Comfort Found in Good Old Books

by George Hamlin Fitch

Oriental Fairy Tales and German Legends—The Ancient Arabian Stories and the Nibelungenlied Among World's Greatest Books.

The gap between the ancient writers and the modern is bridged by several great books, which have been translated into all languages. Among these the following are entitled to a place: The Arabian Nights; Don Quixote, by Cervantes; The Divine Comedy, by Dante; The Imitation of Christ; The Rubá'iyát of Omar Khayyám, St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Nibelungenlied.

Other great books could be added to this list, such as Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography, Boccaccio's Tales, the Analects of Confucius and Mahomet's Koran. But these are not among the books which one must read. Those that I have named first should be read by any one who wishes to get the best in all literature. And another reason is that characters and sayings from these books are so often quoted that to be ignorant of them is to miss much which is significant in the literature of the last hundred years. Whatever forms a part of everyday speech cannot be ignored, and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and Dante's Divine Comedy are three books that have made so strong an impression on the world that they have stimulated the imagination of hundreds of writers and have formed the text for many volumes. Dante's great work alone has been commented upon by hundreds of writers, and these commentaries and the various editions make up a library of over five thousand volumes. The Arabian Nights has been translated from the original into all languages, although the primitive tales still serve to amuse Arabs when told by the professional story-tellers of today.

Edmund Dulac's Conception
of Queen Scheherezade, who told the
"Arabian Nights" Tales

In choosing the great books of the world first place must be given to those which have passed into the common language of the people or which have been quoted so frequently that one cannot remain ignorant of them. After the Bible and Shakespeare the third place must be given to The Arabian Nights, a collection of tales of Arabia and Egypt, supposed to have been related by Queen Scheherezade to her royal husband when he was wakeful in the night. The first story was told in order that he might not carry out his determination to have her executed on the following morning; so she halted her tale at a very interesting point and, artfully playing upon the King's interest, every night she stopped her story at a point which piqued curiosity. In this way, so the legend goes, she entertained her spouse for one thousand and one nights, until he decided that so good a story-teller deserved to keep her head.

Today these Arabian tales and many variants of The Thousand and One Nights are told by professional story-tellers who call to their aid all the resources of gesture, facial expression and variety of tone. In fact, these Oriental story-tellers are consummate actors, who play upon the emotions of their excitable audiences until they are able to move them to laughter and tears. This childlike character the Arab has retained until today, despite the fact that he is rapidly becoming expert in the latest finance and that he is a past master in the handling of the thousands of tourists who visit Egypt, Arabia and other Mohammedan countries every year.

The sources of the leading tales of The Arabian Nights cannot be traced. Such stories as Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp may be found in the literature of all Oriental countries, but the form in which these Arabian tales have come down to us shows that they were collected and arranged during the reign of the good Caliph Haroun al Raschid of Bagdad, who flourished in the closing years of the eighth century. The book was first made known to European readers by Antoine Galland in 1704. This French writer made a free paraphrase of some of the tales, but, singularly enough, omitted the famous stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba.